The Wanting Seed [Hardcover]

Anthony Burgess (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1996

Set in the near future, The Wanting Seed is a Malthusian comedy about the strange world overpopulation will produce.

Tristram Foxe and his wife, Beatrice-Joanna, live in their skyscraper world where official family limitation glorifies homosexuality. Eventually, their world is transformed into a chaos of cannibalistic dining-clubs, fantastic fertility rituals, and wars without anger. It is a novel both extravagantly funny and grimly serious.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Wildly and fantastically funny. . . . Here too is all the usual rich exuberance of Mr. Burgesss vocabulary, his love of quotations and literary allusions. . . . A remarkable and brilliantly imagined novel, vital and inventive.” (Times Literary Supplement [London] ) --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

About the Author

Anthony Burgess is the author of many works, including The Wanting Seed, Nothing Like the Sun, The Doctor Is Sick, The Long Day Wanes, Honey for the Bears, and ReJoyce. He died in 1993. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Hardcover
• ISBN-10: 9997976398
• ISBN-13: 978-9997976390
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (39 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #9,328,225 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Anthony Burgess (25th February 1917-22nd November 1993) was one of the UK's leading academics and most respected literary figures. A prolific author, during his writing career Burgess found success as a novelist, critic, composer, playwright, screenwriter, travel writer, essayist, poet and librettist, as well as working as a translator, broadcaster, linguist and educationalist. His fiction also includes NOTHING LIKE THE SUN, a recreation of Shakespeare's love-life, but he is perhaps most famous for the complex and controversial novel A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, exploring the nature of evil. Born in Manchester, he spent time living in Southeast Asia, the USA and Mediterranean Europe as well as in England, until his death in 1993.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

48 of 54 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Turns the typical dystopian novel on its ear, February 24, 2002

By 

P. Nicholas Keppler "rorscach12" (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Wanting Seed (Norton Paperback Fiction) (Paperback)

Your bookstore is stocked full of novels predicting mankind's future, but none quite like this. With the Wanting Seed, Anthony Burgess turns the typical dystopian novel on its ear. Instead of a methodical, technorganic world, Mr. Burgess presents a smelly, macrobiotic mess of overpopulation and disharmony. Instead of a more stringent emphasis on rightwing ideals, the aforementioned overpopulation has caused an enthusiastic governmental endorsement of homosexuality and opposition to typical family ideals. Instead of a grim, foreboding atmosphere, Mr. Burgess employs a lighthearted, quirky tone, allowing readers to smirk at the ridiculousness and incongruity to which the world of the Wanting Seed has been driven. It is obvious that Mr. Burgess, the same literary practical joker who filled his best-know book, A Clockwork Orange, with make-up slang, meant to poke some well-needed fun at the dismal 1984/Brave New World genre.

But just because the Wanting Seed is a work of playful parody and dark comedy does not mean there is nothing profound about it. In fact if I had to pick the one dystopian novel towards which our society is most surely leaning, it would be this one (which is pretty amazing considering it was written in 1962). As counties like China and India are regulating procreation and instituting their own versions of Mr. Burgess' "population police" and the value of human life wilts ever downward, I wonder how close we are to vision of the Wanting Seed. The novel stands as a warning that repressing man's natural urges and diminishing his worth is not the answer to the problem. Your bookstore is stocked full of novels predicting mankind's future, but few as startling and important as this.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Stands with Orwell, can it stand on its own?, May 9, 2005

By 

Christopher M. Williams "BulgarianPoke" (Shumen, Bulgaria) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Wanting Seed (Norton Paperback Fiction) (Paperback)

Most people will doubtlessly read this book along side or in light of the more famous dystopian novels, such as "1984", "Brave New World", and (let us not forget) "Anthem", and rightfully so. In this literary conversation that considers how humans would respond to different versions of a futuristic totalitarianism, "The Wanting Seed" has its own unique perspective. However, unlike some of these other novels, when it is when forced to stand alone, I'm not sure if it's that great of a read. I gave the book 4 stars because it makes the genre more interesting, but I would have given it 3 stars if I was judging it on its own reading pleasure.

The most interesting aspect of "The Wanting Seed" is Burgess's twist on the usual dystopian plot, where a brave individual battles against some variation of a static, overbearing Big Brother. Instead, Burgess posits a state that has figured out how to gauge and steer man's competing psychological impulses into predictable cycles. Thus, political order is in constant flux between hyper-rational centralization (Rousseau, Marx) and one that gives ample release to Man's all-too-human side (Malthus, Hobbes, Smith). As the novel begins, the political order is at its most rational: homosexuality is encouraged by the state, couples are allowed one child, people eat a state-rationed protein mash, and rules don't have to be enforced by the police. We first meet Beatrice-Joanna Foxe after the death of her only allotted child. The doctor absurdly encourages her to be "modern", "sensible", and of course "rational", telling her to "think about this in national terms, in global terms. One less mouth to feed. One more half-kilo of phosphorus pentoxide to nourish the earth". We then meet her academic husband Tristram, who is also disgruntled by the stifling, prevailing order. It is through Tristram's eyes see all that is unsatisfying in a planned, centralized, and paternalistic state. Naturally, that order collapses due to food shortages and crime (apparently, planned societies can't efficiently feed their people, isn't that right Kim Jong Il?). We then follow Tristram as he seeks out his wife after she leaves him and winds up in the military. All the while and with cannibalistic fun, society moves between various stages of its reordering: from the "state of nature", to ad-hoc tribal units that ensure protection, to the recreation of a militaristic state, and back again to the liberal, rational order. Each stage has outlets for some aspect of Man's will, such as violence and lust, but never all of them, such as security.

While all the political philosophy is great, and there's a few good gags along the way (After hearing a strange tongue, which turn out to be Rabelais, one character must explain that it is "French. One of the Dead Languages."), there are too many unrealized plot lines (what happened to the conflict between Tristram and his brother Derek?) and the key characters at the beginning of the novel disappear. Also, Burgess likes to drop names of his contemporaries in the literai (Halberstam, Toynbee, Maugham, etc.), which is kind of interesting, and why not name the characters after your buddies? But, in addition to some of the frequent and painfully obscure vocabulary Burgess uses (not that I have a wide one to begin with, but don't forget your dictionary), it begins to feel like an internal game or inside joke amongst friends. I don't think this is overt snobbishness, and who cares if it is, but it does make the book drag a bit. Ultimately, "The Wanting Seed" isn't waste of time, and it is a great supplement to a widely read genre of books. However, I think that there is a reason so many people have read "1984", but have not even heard of "The Wanting Seed."

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Better than Clockwork Orange... Yes!, December 16, 2005

By 

Worm (St. Louis, MO) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Wanting Seed (Norton Paperback Fiction) (Paperback)

(Written for Worm's Sci Fi Haven by countezero, more of his reviews can be read here: www.wormsscifi.com/haven)

Had Anthony Burgess done something more than write novels that read like fiendishly clever jokes played out at the expense of the literati, he may very well have found his name among the titans of 20th century writers when he died in 1993.

Of the innumerable works Burgess wrote, only a handful of titles remain in print today, all of which share a delicate connection, of some sort, to other literary genres or to actual titans themselves. There's Re Joyce, which I'm sure everyone can easily attach to its provocateur, Nothing Like the Sun, an homage to a certain William Shakespeare, Honey for Bears, which tackles Cold War paranoia by producing a humorous comedy of errors told with the serious confines of a spy novel. All struggle to escape the impressive geometry that is both the foundation and the catalyst for their narrative.

If you are unfamiliar with these works, rest assured you are not alone. The larger world, science fiction fans and film enthusiasts included, know Burgess only for a curious exercise in language he conducted called A Clockwork Orange, a novella whose merits and flaws long ago drowned under the powerful imagery and arresting violence of the Stanley Kubrick film that bears the same name. Having tackled both the morality play and the bildungsroman at the same time with A Clockwork Orange, two genres I feel certain Alex and his devilish little droogs were meant to be making fun of, he set his sites firmly on the theater of future in novel called The Wanting Seed (1962), which can be summed up as a dystopian comedy, if there is such a thing-and if there isn't, so much the better for the punch line of Burgess's grim joke.

To write a dystopian novel, one must seize on some sort ideology or philosophy or another and forecast its ultimate (evil) end, as George Orwell did with socialism in 1984 and Aldous Huxley did with liberalism in Brave New World. True to a novel whose vocabulary often relies on words like rosacea (which means "of roses," according to my Latin dictionary) to describe a person's acne, Burgess has chosen the (somewhat obscure) theories of Thomas Malthus, whose influential Essay on Population (1798) is known, perhaps, to only the most rigorous academics. The nearest mention of Malthus in popular culture is just a few lines above this one, for Huxley called his morning-after birth control agenda the Malthusian-drill in Brave New World. How best to describe Malthus' pessimistic theory of the future? Above all, his writing searches in vain for a "balance between population increase and natural resources." The failure of such balance, which Malthus, like any good prophet of doom, foretold, is the fulcrum for the plot in The Wanting Seed, a devastating novel of practical appraisals that opens with Tristram Foxe and his wife Beatrice-Joanna, the main protagonists, voluntarily putting their child to death at something called the Ministry of Infertility. "One mouth less to feed. One more half-kilo of phosphorus pentoxide to nourish the earth," the doctor says to assuage the grieving mother.

This is the world of rampant overpopulation, where disease, old age, war, pestilence, poverty have all been conquered-to the apparent detriment of human existence. Because of the boom in healthy living, children are almost forbidden and fornication with the opposite sex frowned upon as a waste of energy-"it's sapiens to be homo," a government billboard proclaims in the first few pages of the book.

But as it turns out, Beatrice happens to be something of a woman who enjoys sex with randy men. "She needed two men in her life, her day to be salted with infidelity," Burgess writes. Unbeknownst to her husband, she has taken up with his brother, Derek, a man of some importance at the Ministry of Infertility, who also happens to be masquerading as a homosexual, lipstick, public effeminacy and all, because he is bucking for promotion. Before their tryst, and Beatrice's subsequent impregnation, can be fully discovered, society, as all the Foxes' know it, begins to flake and crumble from an ever increasing inability to feed everyone. The eventual results are both comical and serious. While Tristram rots in jail (thanks to his brother's manipulations) and Beatrice escapes to her sisters to give birth to twins, greater England fantastically reverts to a desperate bacchanalian state of existence, with lavish orgies that anticipate participation in cannibalistic dinners. The totalitarian government recognizes a good thing when it sees it and embraces the new trends, reinstalling religion and warning of a war brewing on the nation's collective horizon. Tristram, freed from jail and on the road searching for his wife, recognizes the shift in politics, but is incapable of doing anything about it-as with all dystopias, this is not a novel of heroes and happy endings, but of people "making the best of things" in circumstances well beyond their control. Like everyone else, he must eat. His stomach eventually leads him to the army, where he suddenly and unexpectedly finds himself fighting in this foreordained war-a war with no enemies and no political goals, and whose actual purpose is one of frightening utility.

Like its author's career, The Wanting Seed suffers, I think, when compared to the lofty peers it shares a particular playing field with, but even so, I've never found a book anywhere that is as penetratingly ironic and humorous as this one. One doesn't laugh when they read Orwell or Huxley, but the reader finds him or herself forced to chuckle when in the midst of this novel's various tribulations. As is the case with most forms of laughter, with The Wanting Seed, we laugh out of self-defense and from familiarity.

Is it as good as A Clockwork Orange? No, it's better.

Five out of Five